People Leave Each Other
in Poetry, conclusion
Mr.
Siegel looked
next at songs having to do with people
leaving each other from the plays
of William Shakespeare. He read this
from Much Ado about Nothing:
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no
more;
Men were
deceivers
ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore;
To one thing
constant
never:
Then
sigh not so,
But
let them go,
And be you
blithe
and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into, hey
nonny,
nonny.
"This belongs to the
sooner said than done [category]," said Mr.
Siegel, "but it's good."
The reason for the definite, permanent melody,"
he explained, is that "vowels
don't have the obstruction consonants
have." He explained that the
wide vowel sounds--"i" "o" and "e"--of the first
line--"Sigh no more, ladies,
sigh no more" -- are very deep and can convey
pain. At the same time, the
line is, he said, "one of the most melodious in
the language."
We
then heard a song from As You Like It,
which
Mr. Siegel said was "not about a man and
woman" but about ingratitude:
Blow, blow, thou winter
wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
And later there are these lines:
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter
sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Shakespeare, I
learned, hated ingratitude. Of
"Freeze, freeze, thou bitter
sky," Mr. Siegel said, "The grandeur of this
line is its sharpness and
wideness at the same time. There is a
comparison between what a cold
sky can do and ingratitude can do--a person not
remembering"--and Shakespeare
says the second is worse. Ingratitude is a
form of leaving by a person,
putting aside the meaning of what someone has
done for you.
The last poem Mr.
Siegel read was John Dryden's "The Secular
Masque," written in 1700.
It describes the leaving of an entire century
and addresses the 1600s,
saying: I'm glad you're leaving, you were no
good! All the things you chased
after were corrupt, all your wars were
useless, all your lovers untrue.
Dryden says the 17th century was:
All, all of a piece
throughout!
Thy chase had a beast in view.
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out.
And time to begin a new.
"We can feel things
have deceived us," said Mr. Siegel. This
"is a saying the 17th century
was essentially a failure and deceived one--it
promised something and didn't
deliver the goods." The poem is angry, but
it has dignity.
Mr. Siegel described this as "one of the mighty
stanzas," of English poetry.
"It is stately and it is lyrical" he said.
"The implication is: in
a century things were looked for, and they
didn't happen."
Eli Siegel provided
what persons in the centuries have looked
for--the means of understanding
ourselves and the world. As this lecture
showed, that understanding
is in his statement, "All beauty is a making
one of opposites, and the
making one of opposites is what we are going
after in ourselves."
To
return
to beginning of
People Leave Each Other in Poetry
Resource:
See
Chapter 7, Love and Reality
from
Self
and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic
Realism by Eli Siegel
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